[Spambayes] New to this program & Questions

[Tony Meyer]

> I have email accounts on three different servers and would
> like to filter out the spam on them all.  However all three
> mail servers use the same port numbers.  When I told SB the
> addresses of the three mail servers it told me that each mail
> server needed to have the port number specified, so I typed
> the same port number 3 times seperated by commas.  It then
> told me that each port number must be unique. 

Each *local* port number must be unique.  The remote servers can all be on
the same port.  For example:

With addresses:
  tonym and tmeyer @mail.example.com
  tm and t-meyer @mail.example2.com

You enter into the "Remote Servers" option:
"mail.example.com,mail.example2.com".  (This assumes port 110, which is
normal.  If it was something else, then you'd enter (eg)
"mail.example.com:8110,mail.example2.com:8110".

You enter into the "Local Ports" option: "110,111" (or "8110,8111".  It
doesn't matter as long as the ports on your local machine aren't already
used).

In OE, you create (edit) four accounts, one for each email address, with the
normal usernames and passwords.  For the "tonym" and "tmeyer" accounts, you
enter the POP3 server name as "localhost" and (on the Advanced tab) enter
the port number as "110" (actually, it'll already be this).  For the "tm"
and "t-meyer" accounts, you enter the POP3 server name as "localhost" and
(on the Advanced tab) enter the port number as "111".

Make sense?

> When I tried sending mail to the "Train as ham" address, my
> mail server rejected it because it didn't know where to find 
> "localhost". 

Firstly, using the SMTP proxy to train SpamBayes is not recommended with
Outlook Express.  To effectively train, SpamBayes needs the message exactly
as it arrived.  OE (like many clients) aren't capable of sending this on, so
SpamBayes looks for the cached copy of the message as it arrived - to do
this, it needs to know the (SpamBayes) ID of the message.  With most
clients, this can be hidden in headers of the message that you never see.
This (like a lot of things) doesn't work with OE, though.  That means you'd
have to manually put the message's ID into the forward mail to train, which
is too much hassle to be worth it.

I highly recommend that you use the web interface to train.  Most sb_server
users do, and have no problems with it.

If you do want to persist with the SMTP proxy, then I imagine that the
problem finding "localhost" was that you haven't configured the SMTP proxy
(boxes under the POP3 proxy options in the configuration page).

> How do I forward messages to SB without going through
> the mail server? 

Exactly as you describe below:

> I thought that maybe I needed to OE to route outgoing mail
> through SB as well so that SB would see the messages destined
> for the ham/spam at localhost addresses and keep them and then
> forward all others on to the true outgoing mail server.

Exactly right.

> But again, how do I tell SB WHICH mail server to use for each
> particular account? 

This works just like the POP3 proxy.

> Several of the mail accounts require that I login to the
> OUTGOING mail server using a DIFFERENT login name than the
> INCOMING mail server.  How do I specify this so that SB will
> know what to do?

Just pretend that SpamBayes isn't doing anything, and it will all work as
normal.

=Tony.Meyer

-- 
Please always include the list (spambayes at python.org) in your replies
(reply-all), and please don't send me personal mail about SpamBayes.
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~tameyer/writing/reply_all.html explains this.